This project evolved from Splinter, the SMT cordwood project I did last summer/fall. The ring is powered by tiny size 10 hearing aide batteries which should give 4-6 weeks of intermittent use, once I come up with a design that doesn’t break after a few days of wear and update the firmware to put the ATtinyx5 to sleep. The first rev (labelled ‘blink-ring’) used deep red 650nm LEDs. Searching for particular component lengths gave me an excuse to use strange 0508 resistors. And somehow, this is my first Charlieplexing project. Yaay novelty soldering!

NeruroBytes is not a strange platform for neural nets. It’s physical neurons, rendered in PCBs and Molex connectors. Now, finally, it’s a Kickstarter project, and one of the more exciting educational electronic projects we’ve ever seen.

Since then, the team behind NeuroBytes have received an NHS grant, they’re certified Open Source Hardware through OSHWA, and there are now enough NeuroBytes to recreate the connectome of a flatworm. It’s doubtful the team actually has enough patience to recreate the brain of even the simplest organism, but is already an impressive feat.

The highlights of the NeuroBytes Kickstarter include seven different types of neurons for different sensory systems, kits to test the patellar reflex, and what is probably most interesting to the Hackaday crowd, a Braitenberg Vehicle chassis, meant to test the ideas set forth in Valentino Braitenberg’s book, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. If that book doesn’t sound familiar, BEAM robots probably do; that’s where the idea for BEAM robots came from.